Toward Eternity
by Genine
Summary: It all started with a boy. A girl. A graveyard.
All was quiet during the unearthly hour. Her young heart beated like never before. Lashed dark brown eyes above freckles fluttered open. A faint smile was illuminated by the chiaroscuro patterns cast by the moonlight sifted through the curtains. The young girl sat up up in her bedroom, and grabbed a stocky Polaroid camera from her desk which was messily littered along with the walls of her room with unusual photos of her own device. Here displayed a badly bruised and scraped child's knee. There, a dead rotting kitten found on the side of the street with maggots tearing its entrails asunder. Then, moonlight shining through a rusted gateway littered with old leaves. Various pictures were of dilapidated, crumbling interiors of Victorian homes.

She donned the camera in her hands. Her small slim figure peeked out of a window and leaped out into the stillness of the neighborhood. The moonlight illuminated a young raven-haired seventeen year old girl in a simple black dress, black stockings, and Mary Janes. She grabbed her bicycle leaning against the brick of the house and placed the camera in the basket. She rode out onto the night, fleeing the cookie cutter suburban neighborhood.

It was a ten minute ride to her destination, past the older buildings of the community. A new but historic place she had never visited before. A place illustrated of vaguely in the historic newspapers of the town that she had combed over.

Finally, she came to what she needed to see. She dropped off her bicycle on the rotten leaf covered cobblestones. Before her stood the majestic iron cast gateway entrance to the graveyard. Dew glistened on the nameplate title 'ADDAMS.' She looked left and right, making sure she was alone. Not a soul in sight. She fingered delicately the mysterious letters, before taking her camera and snapping a shot. She failed to realize that a branch hid from view the sentence 'VISITORS NEVER WELCOME.' Yet, one wonders if she was aware of the rule, would she have even stopped trespassing.

After all, this wasn't her first graveyard.

Her heart beat faster as she sauntered through the fog, stopping at each headstone as if making a visit to old made sure to make small gentle quiet steps in order to respect the dead. What stories did this graveyard have to tell, she wondered passionately. What marvelous characters had ended their lives here? Snapping her camera at different angles, she admired the strangely beautiful and old-fashioned names on each one, some dating even earlier than the 1900s. Some of the graves had a unique statue which she assumed portrayed the mechanism of death the person experienced. Other graves had a talented caricature-like portrayal focusing on the most notable individual characteristics the person possessed, ensuring that certain assets would not be forgotten by any future generations. She admired the architecture of the mausoleums.

Eventually, she wandered to a fresh mound of dirt and a hole in the ground. To her delight she discovered an open grave. One had yet to be buried six feet under in the hours forthcoming. She looked left and right for signs of a funeral; she could perceive none. She sighed sadly. She had never been to a funeral. Her family was healthy enough to not have anyone die in her life of seventeen years. And it was not like she could wander into a funeral. After all, most funerals happened only in the daytime, and it was during the daytime that her strict parents controlled her. And it was only during the night that she could manage to sneak out, free from their narrow mindedness and judgements.

Ever since she was a young child, they noticed her preoccupation with death. She stared longingly at graveyards through the car window, and chose to have discourse about death over light conversation, which made most strangers uncomfortable. She wore black all the time, hanged out with the most strange people at school, and chose to stay indoors analyzing Emily Dickinson's poetry or mastering the French language over being involved in outdoor activities like camping or baseball. She took pictures of dead things, and developed them and put them all over the walls of her room. And worst of all, she grew roses just to snip the petals off with scissors. It hurt her that her parents looked down on her developed personality. Sometimes she even questioned if they were her real family; she was so different from them. She also had been bullied many times over the years. She attributed also her lack of a boyfriend, she thought, to her ugliness rather than eccentric personality, but the former was far from the truth. She was almost vampiric in beauty, with pale skin and a prominent nose that was hooked at the same time as pointed. She had long beautiful raven hair, and entrancing almost majestic almond-shaped eyes, and high cheekbones.

It hurt, but she learned to callus over such wounds and insecurities. She had learned to develop a cool and collected exterior as a defense mechanism, to hide her lack of self-esteem, but her unaffected state at times furied people who wanted to elicit a reaction.

So it was no wonder with all the judgement and loneliness in her life she preferred graveyards over people. At least Death was unifying and most welcoming to all, regardless of one's personal interests or hobbies. She longed to be dead. Not in a suicidal way, but in the way that one accepts the beautifully inevitable. Death was always there overshadowing her. Like a best friend, a companion, the soulmate she had never known but had always longed for

Some people chose to worship the sun, even the concept of God, as a life-giving force. She chose to worship Death. For without Death, there would be no such thing as life.

Seeing that open, empty grave there stirred something within her. She put her hand over heart, sighing. So much inspiration, so much beauty. There was passion, and yet there was peace. In her perceived isolation, she felt unembarrassed. She felt emotionally compelled to recite one of her favorite poems by Emily Dickinson to the tilted heads of tombstones, the nonjudgemental audience.

"Because I could not stop for Death- He kindly stopped for me- The Carriage held but just Ourselves- And Immortality," she murmured, dancing flamboyantly around the open grave with open armed gestures.

"We passed the School, where Children strove At Recess-in the Ring-We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain- We passed the Setting Sun-" she said, in drama raising her hand down from above her head to the ground.

"Or rather-He passed us- The Dews drew quivering and chill-For only Gossamer, my Gown -My Tippet-only Tulle-" she declared humbly, giving an elegant curtsy to the headstone.

"We paused before a House that seemed A Swelling of the Ground- The Roof was scarcely visible- The Cornice-in the Ground-" she knelt down to the empty grave below her, tracing the dirt with her finger.

"Since then-'tis Centuries-and yet Feels shorter than the Day I first surmised the Horses' Heads..." she recited.

She paused at the end, breaking character. To her dismay she realized, she had forgotten the last line.

"I first surmised the Horses' Heads... Horses' Heads," she repeated to herself worriedly, standing up.

She searched her mind for the answer, but from her consciousness there came none. And then, as if a miracle, a voice from the darkness emerged, providing the rest.

"Were toward Eternity," a male's voice uttered.

Startled, she jumped, and turned around to face the source of the noise, clutching her camera tightly. She feared that an apparition stood before her in the graveyard's moonlight. Her eyes gazed into a dark-haired young man in a suit, aged about eighteen.

She could swear she felt her beating heart stop.


End file.
